Fedora 14, wireless keyboards and encryption

[Chris Northwood]

On 1 December 2010 00:32, Phil Meyer <pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/2010 04:32 PM, Chris Northwood wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> So, I'm having a problem with my Fedora 14 setup. I've recently
>> installed the distro on the machine, and set up full disk encryption
>> using the standard method in Anaconda. However, on the passphrase
>> screen (the one which appears as the OS starts), any input on my
>> wireless USB keyboard (this one:
>> http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=223792) doesn't work -
>> there appears to be no response to input from the keyboard. If I
>> connect a wired keyboard (this isn't a long-term solution, however -
>> the box is to become a media server, hidden behind my TV), then I can
>> enter the passphrase and continue just fine - once I get to the normal
>> user login screen, then I can enter my password and log in then. I
>> don't believe it's a BIOS problem as I can use the keyboard to
>> navigate around the BIOS setup screens no problem.
>>
>> I did set up my machine using the wired keyboard, and only changed to
>> the wireless one at a later date, so I'm wondering if some relevant
>> kmod is missing when it's required, or something like that.
>>
>> Any help to get my wireless keyboard up and running so I can enter my
>> passphrase with it would be much appreciated!
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Chris Northwood
>
>
> Best Guess:
>
> By not having the wireless (USB dongle, I am assuming) when installing,
> the system did not put the USB human interface drivers in the initrd file.
>
> You can easily run dracut to correct that.
>
> You may want to substitute values in my example just to be sure ...
>
> # cd /boot
> # dracut --force initramfs-`uname -r`.img  `uname -r`
>
> Next time you reboot you should be fine, or next time you get a kernel
> update from yum it will also get 'fixed' as long as the wireless
> keyboard is plugged in when you do it.
>
> Good Luck!

Thanks for the advice, but after manually recreating the initrd then
the same still occurs. My wired keyboard is also USB, so I don't think
it's that. I dug into it some more and checked dmesg - my
keyboard/mouse aren't getting recognised until after LUKS. Apparently
the module I'm interested in is hid_sunplus. I tried manually adding
that to the initrd with Dracut using:

dracut --force --add-drivers hid_sunplus  initramfs-`uname -r`.img  `uname -r`

Which works! Now, I believe I have an issue where the next time
there's a kernel update, this will be lost. So I guess the question
is, how do I make sure this is included in future initramfs
generations (or is this a bug in initramfs generation?)

Thanks,

Chris Northwood